Before she could answer, a third time came the cry, this time in despairing though suppressed agony,--

"Mother, don't let them put me in a hole."

The mother gave a cry like the child's, and her heart within her became like water.

"Oh, G.o.d!" she gasped, and could say no more.

But with the prayer--for what is a prayer but a calling on the name of the Lord?--came to her a little calm, and she was able to speak. She bent over him and kissed his forehead.

"My darling Moxy, mother loves you," she said.

What that had to do with it she did not ask herself. The child looked up in her face with dim eyes.

"Pray to the heavenly father, Moxy," she went on--and there stopped, thinking what she should tell him to ask for. "Tell him," she resumed, "that you don't want to be put in a hole, and tell him that mother does not want you to be put in a hole, for she loves you with all her heart."

"Don't put me in the hole," said Moxy, now using the definite article.

"Jesus Christ was put in the hole," said the voice of the next elder boy from behind his mother. He had come in softly, and she had neither seen nor heard him. It was Sunday, and he had strolled into a church or meeting-house--does it matter which?--and had heard the wonderful story of hope. It was remarkable though that he had taken it up as he did, for he went on to add, "but he didn't mind it much, and soon got out again."

"Ah, yes, Moxy!" said the poor mother, "Jesus died for our sins, and you must ask him to take you up to heaven."

But Moxy did not know anything about sins, and just as little about heaven. What he wanted was an a.s.surance that he would not be put in the hole. And the mother, now a little calmer, thought she saw what she ought to say.

"It ain't your soul, it's only your body, Moxy, they put in the hole,"

she said.

"I don't want to be put in the hole," Moxy almost screamed. "I don't want my head cut off!"

The poor mother was at her wits' end.

But here the child fell into a troubled sleep, and for some hours a silence as of the grave filled the dreary cellar.

The moment he woke the same cry came from his fevered lips, "Don't put me in the hole," and at intervals, growing longer as he grew weaker, the cry came all the day.

CHAPTER XLIII.

DELIVERANCE.

Hester had been to church, and had then visited some of her people, carrying them words of comfort and hope. They received them in a way at her hand, but none of them, had they gone, would have found them at church. How seldom is the man in the pulpit able to make people feel that the things he is talking about are things at all! Neither when the heavens are black with clouds and rain, nor when the sun rises glorious in a blue perfection, do many care to sit down and be taught astronomy!

But Hester was a live gospel to them--and most when she sang. Even the name of the Saviour uttered in her singing tone and with the expression she then gave it, came nearer to them than when she spoke it. The very brooding of the voice on a word, seems to hatch something of what is in it. She often felt, however, as if some new, other kind of messengers than she or such as she, must one day be sent them; for there seemed a gulf between their thoughts and hers, such as neither they nor she could pa.s.s.

In fact they _could not_ think the things she thought, and had no vocabulary or phrases or imagery whereby to express their own thinkings.

G.o.d does not hurry such: have we enough of hope for them, or patience with them? I suspect their teachers must arise among themselves. They too must have an elect of their own kind, of like pa.s.sions with themselves, to lift them up, and perhaps shame those that cannot reach them. Our teaching to them is no teaching at all; it does not reach their ignorance; perhaps they require a teaching that to our ignorance would seem no teaching at all, or even bad teaching. How many things are there in the world in which the wisest of us can ill descry the hand of G.o.d! Who not knowing could read the lily in its bulb, the great oak in the pebble-like acorn? G.o.d's beginnings do not _look_ like his endings, but they _are_ like; the oak _is_ in the acorn, though we cannot see it. The ranting preacher, uttering huge untruths, may yet wake vital verities in chaotic minds--convey to a heart some saving fact, rudely wrapped in husks of lies even against G.o.d himself.

Mr. Christopher, thrown at one time into daily relations with a good sort of man, had tried all he could to rouse him to a sense of his higher duties and spiritual privileges, but entirely without success. A preacher came round, whose gospel was largely composed of h.e.l.l-fire and malediction, with frequent allusion to the love of a most unlovely G.o.d, as represented by him. This preacher woke up the man. "And then," said Christopher, "I was able to be of service to him, and get him on. He speedily outgrew the lies his prophet had taught him, and became a devout Christian; while the man who had been the means of rousing him was tried for bigamy, convicted and punished."

This Sunday Hester, in her dejection and sadness about Gartley, over whom--not her loss of him--she mourned deeply, felt more than ever, if not that she could not reach her people, yet how little she was able to touch them, and there came upon her a hopelessness that was heavy, sinking into the very roots of her life, and making existence itself appear a dull and undesirable thing. Hitherto life had seemed a good thing, worth holding up as a heave-offering to him who made it; now she had to learn to take life itself from the hand of G.o.d as his will, in faith that he would prove it a good gift. She had to learn that in _all_ drearinesses, of the flesh or spirit, even in those that seem to come of having nothing to do, or from being unable to do what we think we have to do, the refuge is the same--he who is the root and crown of life. Who would receive comfort from anything but love? Who would build on anything but the eternal? Who would lean on that which has in itself no persistence? Even the closest human loves have their only endurance, only hope of perfection, in the eternal perfect love of which they are the rainbow-refractions. I cannot love son or daughter as I would, save loving them as the children of the eternal G.o.d, in whom his spirit dwells and works, making them altogether lovely, and me more and more love-capable. That they are mine is not enough ground for enough love--will not serve as operative reason to the height of the love my own soul demands from itself for them. But they are mine because they are his, and he is the demander and enabler of love.

The day was a close, foggy, cold, dreary day. The service at church had not seemed interesting. She laid the blame on herself, and neither on prayers nor lessons nor psalms nor preacher, though in truth some of these might have been better; the heart seemed to have gone out of the world--as if not Baal but G.o.d had gone to sleep, and his children had waked before him and found the dismal gray of the world's morning full of discomfortable ghosts. She tried her New Testament; but Jesus too seemed far away--nothing left but the story about him--as if he had forgotten his promise, and was no longer in the world. She tried some of her favourite poems: each and all were infected with the same disease--with common-place nothingness. They seemed all made up--words!

words! words! Nothing was left her in the valley but the shadow, and the last weapon, All-prayer. She fell upon her knees and cried to G.o.d for life. "My heart is dead within me," she said, and poured out her lack into the hearing of him from whom she had come that she might have himself, and so be. She did not dwell upon her sorrows; even they had sunk and all but vanished in the gray ma.s.s of lost interest.

The modern representatives of Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar would comfort us with the a.s.surance that all such depression has physical causes: right or wrong, what does their comfort profit! Consolation in being told that we are slaves! What n.o.ble nature would be content to be cured of sadness by a dose of medicine? There is in the heart a conviction that the soul ought to be supreme over the body and its laws; that there must be a faith which conquers the body with all its tyrants; and that no soul is right until it has that faith--until it is in closest, most immediate understanding with its own unchangeable root, G.o.d himself.

Such faith may not at once remove the physical cause, if such there be, but it will be more potent still; in the presence of both the cause and the effect, its very atmosphere will be a peace tremulous with unborn gladness. This gained, the medicine, the regimen, or the change of air may be resorted to without sense of degradation, with cheerful hope and some indifference. Such is perhaps the final victory of faith. Faith, in such circ.u.mstances, must be of the purest, and may be of the strongest.

In few other circ.u.mstances can it have such an opportunity--can it rise to equal height. It may be its final lesson, and deepest. G.o.d is in it just in his seeming to be not in it--that we may choose him in the darkness of the feeling, stretch out the hand to him when we cannot see him, verify him in the vagueness of the dream, call to him in the absence of impulse, obey him in the weakness of the will.

Even in her prayers Hester could not get near him. It seemed as if his ear were turned away from her cry. She sank into a kind of lethargic stupor. I think, in order to convey to us the spiritual help we need, it is sometimes necessary--just as, according to the psalmist, "he giveth to his beloved in their sleep"--to cast us into a sort of mental quiescence, that the noise of the winds and waters of the questioning intellect and roused feelings may not interfere with the impression the master would make upon our beings. But Hester's lethargy lasted long, and was not so removed. She rose from her knees in a kind of despair, almost ready to think that either there was no G.o.d, or he would not hear her. An inaccessible G.o.d was worse than no G.o.d at all! In either case she would rather cease!

It had been dark for hours, but she had lighted no candle, and sat in bodily as in spiritual darkness. She was in her bedroom, which was on the second floor, at the back of the house, looking out on the top of the gallery that led to the great room. She had no fire. One was burning away unheeded in the drawing-room below. She was too miserable to care whether she was cold or warm. When she had got some light in her body, then she would go and get warm!

What time it was she did not know. She had been summoned to the last meal of the day, but had forgotten the summons. It must have been about ten o'clock. The streets were silent, the square deserted--as usual. The evening was raw and cold, one to drive everybody in-doors that had doors to go in at.

Through the cold and darkness came a shriek that chilled her with horror. Yet it seemed as if she had been expecting it--as if the cloud of misery that had all day been gathering deeper and deeper above and around her, had at length reached its fullness, and burst in the lightning of that shriek. It was followed by another and yet another.

Whence did they come? Not from the street, for all beside was still; even the roar of London was hushed! And there was a certain something in the sound of them that a.s.sured her that they rose in the house. Was Sarah being murdered? She was half-way down the stairs before the thought that sent her was plain to herself.

The house seemed unnaturally still. At the top of the kitchen stairs she called aloud to Sarah--as loud, that is, as a certain tremor in her throat would permit. There came no reply. Down she went to face the worst: she was a woman of true courage--that is, a woman whom no amount of apprehension could deter when she knew she ought to seek the danger.

In the kitchen stood Sarah, motionless, frozen with fear. A candle was in her hand, just lighted. Hester's voice seemed to break her trance.

She started, stared, and fell a trembling. She made her drink some water, and then she came to herself.

"It's in the coal-cellar, miss!" she gasped. "I was that minute going to fetch a scuttleful! There's something buried in them coals as sure as my name's Sarah!"

"Nonsense!" returned Hester. "Who could scream like that from under the coals? Come; we'll go and see what it is."

"Laws, miss! don't you go near it now. It's too late to do anything.

Either it's the woman's sperrit as they say was murdered there, or it's a new one."

"And you would let her be killed without interfering?"

"Oh, miss, all's over by this time!" persisted Sarah, with white lips trembling.

"Then you are ready to go to bed with a murderer in the house?" said Hester.

"He's done his business now, an' 'll go away."

"Give me the candle. I will go alone."

"You'll be murdered, miss--as sure's you're alive!"

Hester took the light from her, and went towards the coal-cellar. The old woman sank on a chair.

I have already alluded to the subterranean portion of the house, which extended under the great room. A long vault, corresponding to the gallery above, led to these cellars. It was rather a frightful place to go into in search of the source of a shriek. Its darkness was scarcely affected by the candle she carried; it seemed only to blind herself. She tried holding it above her head, and then she could see a little. The black tunnel stretched on and on, like a tunnel in a feverish dream, a long way before the cellars began to open from it. She advanced, I cannot say fearless, but therefore only the more brave. She felt as if leaving life and safety behind, but her imagination was not much awake, and her mental condition made her almost inclined to welcome death. She reached at last the coal-cellar, the first that opened from the pa.s.sage, and looked in. The coal-heap was low, and the place looked large and very black. She sent her keenest gaze through the darkness, but could see nothing; went in and moved about until she had thrown light into every corner: no one was there. She was on the point of returning when she bethought herself there were other cellars--one the wine-cellar, which was locked: she would go and see if Sarah knew anything about the key of it. But just as she left the coal-cellar, she heard a moan, followed by a succession of low sobs. Her heart began to beat violently, but she stopped to listen. The light of her candle fell upon another door, a pace or two from where she stood. She went to it, laid her ear against it, and listened. The sobs continued a while, ceased, and left all silent. Then clear and sweet, but strange and wild, as if from some region unearthly, came the voice of a child: she could hear distinctly what it said.

"Mother," it rang out, "you _may_ put me in the hole."